Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to BenWilson,
If I have a company, I pay company rate tax on the retained profits. Those are then available for the companies use, but not mine. If I want to then pull the money out as a dividend, I’d pay the difference in the tax rates.
At least, that’s my understanding. It all gets rather complicated and most people take their whole profits out and don’t bother retaining anything. And I’m sure that slightly larger companies or very wealthy contractors would engage in all sorts of fiddles involving offshore trusts and the like.
Incidentally, the effective UK upper marginal tax rate (including employers NI*) rate under Thatcher was 50% (it was 70% for most of her reign and is now 60.3%, even under Cameron).
* UK tax on earnings comprises income tax, employers and employees NI. The last of those is reverse progressive - e.g. it drops to 2% above about GBP40k. While salaries are normally quoted net of employers NI, this is only a convention, the employer has to pay HMRC all three taxes.A similar system operates in most US and Australian states and this should be born in mind when comparing NZ tax rates with overseas.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
OTOH, they are a primitive form of life that evolved eventually into slightly more advanced organisms.
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the top tax rate should never exceed 50% on principle
Because if we did that, the Julie Christies, Paul Reynolds and Rod Petricevics of this world would flee the country, unable to live on a mere million or so a year after tax?
Get up off your knees!
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Oil royalties aren't a business tax though, they're the oil company paying us for the oil, which is ours. We could just leave it in the ground to appreciate in value.
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Petone is not part of Wellington. It's a suburb in the Hutt Valley, which is a conglomeration near to, but separated from Wellington.
It's become standard to describe (in the media) everywhere near a city as part of that city, possibly as an attempt to build support for council amalgamations, but it isn't actually the case.
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Not really. Raglan is a trendy town these days, with a significant arts community.
And apparently the highest per-capita level of benzodiazepine prescriptions in the country.
would like to know who these ‘prominent New Zealand academics’ are, so I can avoid them in the tearoom.
Probably a biochemist and a mechanical engineer. They didn't say they were academics in a relevant field...
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Oh, the joys of meaningless cluster analysis
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Speaker: The Future, in reply to linger,
I believe that sort of thing gets you drummed out of the market research association lest you unveil the fundamental bogosity of much of their output.
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Speaker: The Future, in reply to Mr Mark,
They're polling the wrong electorate, surely? It's the National MPs who choose the leader.
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About 10,000 people speak Russian, no idea how many are reasonably fluent/literate in English?
(I have often wondered how the Electoral Commission pick their languages to translate. German and Dutch are absent from their translations).